The use of animals for testing the safety, toxicity and efficacy of a wide variety of substances is well known. Routine testing is performed on animals that are restrained, as well as animals that are freely moving, and dosing may be achieved by inhalation, whole body exposure, injection, intravenous injection, ingestion, installation, implantation and other methods known in the art. Such testing has involved many species of animals up to non-human primates.
Prior to the advent of automated dosing and sample collection machines, multiple animals were needed in order to collect samples of blood or other bodily fluids, or to measure the physiological endpoints. However, both types of data have not been collected easily at the same time with the same animal. It remains a problem that in present animal testing protocols, measurements of certain physiological endpoints require periodic handling of test animals at time intervals, causing the animals to become stressed. As well, due to the demands of sample acquisition that results in sacrifice of animals, groups of animals need to be used. As a result, over the course of a study samples of fluids are required from different animals in the group that are sacrificed as a study progresses. As a result, it has been necessary to average test results from samples over the members of the group of test animals to obtain overall values, rather than have samples of blood and bodily fluids, as well as physiological data, from the same animal throughout a study.
These and other problems associated with test animal sampling and monitoring are overcome by the present invention.